There is gold for the rising sun,And red for the time when it sets.Green boughs adorn the curving hills,and blue resides in the depth of the sky.The purest light is the heart of the sun,and its absence the essence of night.

In the weight of the earth, nothingness --In the nothingness of sky, endless abundance --

Mountains rise high into the air,Water swiftly descends from a height,Wind travels everywhere without hindrance,And the arrows of the sun are numberless and swift.

Well as the bottle gets low,Gotta sip it slow,And as your bones get looseWe'll sing some paper bag blues-- We'll sing some paper bag blues-- You'll be swayin' and singin'--Singin' paper bag blues.

Well you gone home,And you left me aloneNobody gonna call on the telephoneThe shadows creep,And they lay down flatRight on the catAnd the kitchen mat.There ain't nobody comin';I got noplace to go,And I finished up the lastOf the Oreos. I got the paper bag blues-- I got the paper bag blues--I'm gonna lay down in the kitchen, And sing the paper bag blues.

The Voice of the HeartLeads through a jungle.Sitting in a boat,Steering with an oar through turning currents.The waters twist through winding courses;I follow the path of the swirls.You cannot see the sky,Only green light sifting through the leaves,A glimpse of blue,The sun like a jewel flashing high in the vines.I am a young traveler;It takes youth to travel this path,It takes suppleness to follow the currents,Endurance to keep on without clear means.In the jungle of the heart there is still threat,There is danger for the traveler, and fear.The waters comfort.The waters console.I follow their twisting winding,Through the trees, old as crumbling castles,That murmur with the Voice of the Heart.I follow the stream, that never loses its way,I follow the paths of the waning day,And leave no tracks behind me.I follow, and the sound of the waters is with me.

[Regarding the writing of Pistolero ... Once upon a time when I lived in a yurt in the middle of a meadow with two children and a beautiful young wife, we had a neighbor who was a handsome, crusty fellow with an Eastern-European accent, and a cheerfully brusque manner of friendship. His name was Walter Von Finck, and he had run a commune of sorts, gathering fellow-travelers, and their labors, for the great mission of redeeming mankind. Or somesuch. He had made us a part of his grand collective exercise in the summer of 1978, esconcing us in the house called the Big House then, the Mouse House now that Buddhists run it. Tells you something, eh? But after one summer, during which Tara swelled up with Maria (not depicted above) and we moved into Medford to be near our midwife, we knew we couldn't do Walter's trip. As numerous other people felt the same way, Walter's commune, Rainbow Star, eventually ran out of communal steam. But we still liked living out there at Rainbow Star. We moved onto the property owned by Walter's divorced wife Chris, one of the former original Rainbow Starians, and built our yurt right across the meadow from Walter's little shanty-palace, where Dr. Shandor Weiss now lives under the watchful eye of Vajrasattva. When we convinced Chris to rent a place on her land to build a yurt, it was quite a coup. And a lifesafer, because we were so poor we couldn't actually afford rent on a single-family house in Ashland (shit -- now you couldn't rent that house for less than $1,500 a month -- but $275 was too much for us then). It was a distinct weird coup of ours, and for a long time we didn't really talk that much with Walter, though he was our neighbor. But one day he came up the road with a bag of coffee. That's when we all starting drinking the speedy bean. None too soon, I'm sure. Gave us some motivation. But Walter stayed pretty crusty, even when he was friendly. He was always criticizing the choice of our house location, telling us we were spiritually blind for not realizing "what was going to be built there." Well, nothing was ever built there after we tore our yurt down, but that's another story.

Back in the time I'm talking about, Walter and we had become good neighbors. After the quiet that ensued when we effectively seceded from his commune and nailed down a homestead outside of his autocratic influence, a warmth based on mutual respect arose.

So one night he came over and said that we should come over and watch The Magnificent Seven, with Yul Brenner, Ernest Borgnine, and lots of other big stars. It was showing on TV, and he was going to fire up the generator and we could watch it all together. Man, was that exciting.

Our kids never saw TV, and I mean never. They rarely saw electric light. We cooked and read by kerosene light or propane lamps, after the first year of living in neolithic obscurity. Our stove was so small it had been yanked out of a tiny travel trailer. I was snooping around a hermitage up in the hills built secretly on a monk's land earlier this year by an expatriate Australian, and sho' 'nuff there was our old stove. Still crankin' out the meals. At any rate, it was good times.

We weren't quite as backwoods as the folks in that Close To Eden movie, but it was as close as city kids were likely to get. So on that night, we went over to Walter's place and watched the hell out of this old Western classic, while the generator thundered away on Walter's mud porch. Heavy feng-shui coming over to Walters, with a four-stroke generator pounding away in the entry area.

Well the next day I had a fever in my brain. All that western gunfighting action had roiled my neurons, leaching out old stimulation programs that had been wired in my early developmental stages. A man, I realized, was at his most manly as a gunfighter. The decisive image of the showdown in the plaza. A bullfight where each participant is both bull and bullfighter. The duel, made mechanically swift. Two face off. Only one survives. No equivocation, no ambiguity, no uncertainty. One winner. One dead guy. Ain't no question who the ladies are gonna go for.]

Pistolero, I remember youAt high noonIn the main street,Standing with a wide stance on tapered legsin pointed boots,Your gun-hand loose and poisedover a low-slung holsterHanging heavy with iron.

You and your revolver --You squeeze the trigger and the hammer slams downOn a forty-four center-fire cartridge:The crash of exploding gunpowder.Smoke driftsfrom the muzzle of your pistol andYour enemy's laid out cold.

You repeat this action again and againin a false-front Western town.You practice on old whisky bottles perched on a fence, andThe flying shards delight us,Seeming to explode of themselves,Balanced on that slender rail.

A wild magic you wield in a gunfight you turn, wheel,Blast them from an awkward angle,Run, dive, roll, take aim and shoot again.You make a mess of little towns, whether you're a good or bad guyYou're always shooting up saloons and hotels,Smashing out windows, breaking down doors,Crashing through railings, allowing furniture to be splinteredApart on your head --

Pistolero, gunslinger,we've fallen in love with yourkind of justice.We shed no tears for bad guysWho disturb the peace of innocent townspeople Who destroyed the buffalo? Who annihilated the Navajo?Who are all cut from the sameWhole cloth of pure white goodnessWhich is never stained by the blood of ruffians,Or torn by the anguish of whores,Or disturbed by the stuporous stares of alcoholic Indians, leaning against railings that do not break,Falling heavily through glass that shatters without drama,Collapsing at noon in the boring dustof a real street in a townWhere Wyatt Earp checked out of his hotel an inconceivably long time ago.

One summer I was too poor to buy new shoes. When my oldones got really worn out, like falling apart to where you look psychoticif you wear them in town, I took to going barefoot whenI went to town. That was funny. I used to go barefoot all the timeWhen I was younger, but now, with all these kids, I felt like a poorhillbilly. Finally, when I got a little cash, I broke down and got a pair of blue jogging shoes atSprouse-Reitz for five dollars. They were even too big but they were cheap.So I wore them without socks and looked psychotic.What I discovered after I'd owned them for a while was that they weren't madeof rubber, as I'd assumed; they were made of plastic.I knew because they clicked when I walked on linoleum, and nobody'sNike's or Adidas ever did that. Eventually I discovered that theywere plastic in every detail, from thethread to the fabric, to the insole to thetongue to the wrap-around leather-lookingstuff that's supposed to be suede butis as plastic as everything else. And none of it breathed.Plastic doesn't breathe. It doesn't inhale or exhaleAnd it's not holding its breath. Eventually my feet got sickof those shoes. They were too big, they made me look psychotic, andthey didn't breathe. I threw them away andbreathed a sigh of relief. Those shoes had startedto give me the creeps.

What you can do with it:Cut LA in half with one clean stroke,Raze Century City with a backhand swipe,Vaporize the Hollywood sign with a glance, andblow away all eight lanes of the10 freeway with a single puff of breath.